“Maybe he left some papers, or some record.”
“No way of knowing now. If he did, I guess I dropped the football.”
Koko stood and said, “Well, thank you for talking to us.”
I glared at her and my look said,
“This is awful,” Libby said. “There’s not even enough time to offer you a cup of coffee. I’d love to sit around with you and kick at it for a while.”
“Maybe we should do that,” I said.
“Like when?” Robinson said. “The boat’s going to leave them, Lib.”
“Maybe they could come back.”
“They’d have the same time problem. And none of us really knows anything.” He looked at me apologetically. “You’re certainly welcome to come back but I’m afraid it would just be a waste of your time.”
“You could come back anyway,” Libby said. “If you wanted to you could stay the night. We’d have plenty of time to talk then.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Oh, sure. You’d have to bring sleeping bags. We’re not exactly the Holiday Inn here.”
I had a hunch and so did Libby: I could feel it, like some energy field growing between us. “What do you think he was doing here?” she said.
“Well, we know he wanted to see the States.”
“Do you really believe he came only as a tourist?”
“No.”
She smiled quixotically and I felt Koko stiffen beside me. Koko had come here for information, not to talk too much, and I knew she wouldn’t like the way this was going. Stiffly, she said, “Of course that’s just conjecture. We don’t know any more than you do.”
But Libby was looking at me, not Koko. I said, “Maybe together we’ll all discover stuff we didn’t know we knew. Sometimes you’ve got to give a little to get a lot.”
“What stuff?” Libby said. “Do you actually know something?”
“He used to be a detective,” Koko said dismissively. “Thinks he still is.”
“Really?” Libby smiled at me as if she liked that idea.
“We think Burton came here with someone,” I said.
“Oh, don’t tell them that,” Koko said. “My God, there’s no proof of that at all.”
“Then it doesn’t hurt to tell them, does it? As an unproved theory.”
“Tell us what?” Libby said.
“We think he met a man in Washington and traveled with him. They came through here in May of 1860 and went to New Orleans together. They became close friends.”
Koko’s face was red with anger. She turned away and looked out over the fort.
Libby said, “Do you know what his friend looked like?”
Now there’s a strange question, I thought. I might have expected her to ask whether we knew his name, but who asks about the appearance of a man from a time when photography was so new that few had ever had their pictures taken?
“Do we know what he looked like, Koko?”
“Don’t ask me. How would I know?”
Again Libby made eye contact. I shrugged and Robinson said, “You’re going to miss your boat.” Mischievously, Libby said, “Then they wouldn’t have to worry about the time.”
“That’s her way of saying she wants you to come back,” Robinson said.
“When?”
“Can’t be tomorrow or the next day,” Libby said. “I’m going to school. I’m writing a paper and I’ve got to study for a wicked test. It all hits at once.”
“What about Tuesday?”
“Tuesday would work. Bring good sleeping gear. The ground here’s hard.”
They walked us down to the dock. At the pier we all shook hands. Again they apologized for the hectic schedule. At the very end Libby asked the question I had expected in the beginning. “Do you know the name of the man who
